SAM OLUKOYA, Port Harcourt | Thursday
MINORITY rights campaigners in Nigeria have accused global oil giants Royal Dutch/Shell of years of systematic human rights abuses, saying the company had frequently used police and the military to defend its operations and crush local opposition.
Ledum Mitee, the president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), told a human rights hearing the violation of human rights started in the late 1950s when oil was discovered in the southern region.
Shell is the largest single oil operator in Nigeria, accounting for just over one third of the country’s two million barrels a day in crude oil output.
MOSOP is one of the most vocal opponents of Shell’s operations, which it claims have ruined the land and impoverished the people of the southern delta region.
Mitee provided documents purporting to show plans by Shell to import arms into Nigeria to protect its installations. He charged that armed men had on several occasions used Shell boats and helicopters during attacks on villages seen as centres of opposition to the company’s activities.
The MOSOP tendered what he said was a letter written by Shell on May 4, 1993 in which it sought the Rivers State government’s “usual assistance” to enable a US sub-contractor to lay pipelines. In response, policemen were sent in, and shot dead one person and seriously wounded 11 others, he said.
“Shell cannot deny responsibility for the violence which the government later visited on the Ogoni people,” he added.
Shell’s lawyer at the panel sitting, Onueze Okocha, said the company would set out a clear defence of its actions in later hearings.
Officials from the human rights panel, modelled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and set up in 1999 to investigate three decades of human rights abuses, said they planned a meeting between Shell and MOSOP to promote reconciliation.
Mitee was one of those tried in 1995 along with MOSOP founder Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others over the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. He was found not guilty but the others were found guilty and hanged. – AFP